Resource Consumption Attacks in Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

AD hoc wireless sensor networks (WSNs) promise exciting new applications in the near future, such as ubiquitous on-demand computing power, continuous connectivity, and instantly deployable communication for military and first responders. Prior security work in this area has focused primarily on denial of communication at the routing or medium access control levels. This paper explores resource depletion attacks at the routing protocol layer, which permanently disable networks by quickly draining nodes and battery power. These Vampire attacks are not protocol-specific, in that they do not rely on design properties or implementation faults of particular routing protocols We find that all examined protocols are susceptible to Vampire attacks, which are devastating, difficult to detect, and are easy to carry out using as few as one malicious insider sending only protocol-compliant messages. In the worst case, a single Vampire can increase network-wide energy usage by a factor of O(N), where N in the number of network nodes. We proposed a EWMA method to bound the damage caused by these vampire types of attacks during the packet forwarding phase.